SJF Ventures invests in EdTech company that uses AI to observe real-world performance and deliver expert feedback at a scale human faculty can’t match

NEW YORK, July 16, 2026 — DeweyLearn, the multimodal AI platform that understands human learning at scale, announced the company secured $5 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round, led by SJF Ventures with participation from Catalysis Capital, Morningside, and Owl Ventures, among others. DeweyLearn’s AI combines audio, video, and learning data with domain and learning science knowledge to deliver deep insights into instruction and learning in both physical and online settings across clinical and healthcare education, higher education, workforce learning, and K-12.

In a world in which what you know is less important than what you can do, skills evaluation is rapidly moving toward performance-based assessments. Trained on institutions’ specific curriculums and domain expertise, DeweyLearn watches real learning in action and delivers actionable, expert-level insights at a scale that would be impossible to achieve with human assessment alone. For its innovative multimodal AI, DeweyLearn recently won the 2026 ASU+GSV Cup, selected from more than 3,000 companies as the top education technology startup in the world.

“Human expertise has been a limited resource for our entire history,” said Luyen Chou, co-founder and CEO at DeweyLearn. “With multimodal AI, DeweyLearn can give an aspiring chef real-time feedback on her knife technique from the world’s greatest chefs. It can assess the effectiveness of clinical therapists, as well as allow nursing students to receive real-time feedback in simulated hospitals. We’re making the kind of expert feedback that once required a master watching over your shoulder available to every learner. DeweyLearn represents a paradigm shift in how we assess skills and apply human expertise at scale in areas as varied as healthcare, hospitality, and IT.”

Any use case that requires a human expert to see, hear, and understand in order to assess student performance, DeweyLearn can do as well, if not better, than a human, at scale.

At Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts, DeweyLearn has graded more than 20,000 student homework submissions, serving as a first review for instructor approval or final adjustment, saving hundreds of instructor gradings hours to date and giving aspiring chefs immediate feedback. This time saved on assignment reviews has allowed instructors more time for one-on-one student support and interaction.

DeweyLearn is being used to enhance student assessment across diverse domains. As Katy Genseke, Psy.D., Head of Clinical Product at Riverside Insights, explains, “Riverside, a provider of specialty assessments to students, is working with DeweyLearn to explore new approaches to its assessment offerings to improve efficiency and effectiveness.”

The platform is also used in clinical training. The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is scaling continuing education for therapists working with developmental and complex trauma. 

“SJF is focused on enabling better learning outcomes and career opportunities for all,” said Arrun Kapoor, Managing Director at SJF Ventures. “We were wowed by the transformative potential of DeweyLearn’s approach to applying multi-modal AI for education and confident that the founders have both the industry experience and AI expertise to execute on that potential. We’re proud to partner with DeweyLearn to help instructors and learners master the science of education.”

DeweyLearn was founded by Luyen Chou, a longtime EdTech leader who served as Chief Learning Officer at 2U, Chief Product Officer at Pearson, and founded The School at Columbia University, and Dirk Liebich, an expert in applied AI, data analytics, and predictive analytics. The company is named after John Dewey, the philosopher and educational reformer who encouraged Chou’s grandmother to study teaching at the University of Chicago during his trip to China from 1919 to 1921.

“DeweyLearn is building a model of human learning informed by real cycles of observing, intervening, and measuring across diverse learning domains,” said Dirk Liebich, co-founder and CTO at DeweyLearn. “Our novel approach quickly builds a knowledge graph tailored to each customer, like a knife cut technique or what makes a student chef successful. But, in doing so, we’re also creating a meta knowledge graph of how people learn. Much like Google Earth, we’re building a world model of learning that empirically understands learning at an action level and can apply the insights at scale.”

Learn more about how DeweyLearn is empowering teachers to teach smarter and institutions to lead better at deweylearn.com. 

About DeweyLearn

DeweyLearn combines classroom audio, video, and learning data to deliver deep insights into instruction and learning. From instructional effectiveness to student mastery, cognitive demand to emotional engagement, DeweyLearn uses multimodal AI to help experts assess real performance and improve outcomes. The platform is designed for clinical and healthcare education, higher education, workforce learning, and K-12, in both physical and online classrooms.

About SJF Ventures

Founded in 1999, SJF Ventures is an impact venture capital fund whose mission is to catalyze the development of highly successful businesses that drive lasting, positive changes. Its deep experience in education and workforce includes portfolio companies SchooLinks, Interplay Learning, Elemeno Health, Rhithm and Springboard.

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